What the Best Games Know About Analytics That the Rest Don’t

At this year’s GDC in San Francisco, Dr. Isaac Roseboom’s session, “What the Best Games Know About Analytics That the Rest Don’t,” addressed monetization struggles and how analytics can be used to increase revenues using insights from his company’s analytics platform, deltaDNA. He noted that retention mechanics have improved in free-to-play games with more seamless, interactive onboarding, session/day/week hierarchical game loops and aggressive rewarding systems that maintain player momentum. Examples included a strong task system in Gardenscapes, escalating daily play rewards in Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and strong loops for experienced players in Contest of Champions.

Running a profitable free-to-play game is still challenging. A game with good retention, defined as D1 40% and D7 15%, results in an average player lifetime of 15 days. A gross lifetime value (LTV) goal of $1.50 (before store cut), means an average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) of $0.10. Using deltaDNA’s pool of games, Roseboom looked at US players from the 100 best performing iOS games by monthly active user (MAU), comprised of an even split between puzzle, action and strategy genres.

Based on this pool, he noted the following reasons for poor monetization:

• Being too generous to non-payers – a high D7 retention does not mean good monetization. Roseboom cited only 38% of games with $0.10 ARPDAU had a D7 retention > 10% while 54% of the $0.10 ARPDAU games had D7 paying users > 10%
• Pricing In-App Purchases (IAP) too cheaply – increasing a game’s minimum price point increases the ARPDAU without affecting the conversion rate. Roseboom noted in his example that an APRDAU of $0.10 was reached at IAP priced $2.50-$4.00, which had only a slightly lower conversion rate than IAP priced $1.50-$2.50, concluding that standard IAP priced “lower than $2 devalues the game significantly.”
• No drive for spenders to repeat spending – it’s difficult to get $0.10 ARPDAU without at least three IAPs/spender (lifetime)
• Not enough Whales – a minimum of 5% of spenders should be Whales (> $100 lifetime spend) to get to $0.10 ARPDAU, and most Whales usually spend moderate amounts daily

Thus, for a $0.10 ARPDAU, aim for 10% retention and 10% payers on D7, a minimum price point > $2, at least 3 spends/spender, and 5% of your spenders as Whales

Roseboom advised that using analytics to build a high LTV game requires at least 1,000 spenders to get answers. At a 2% conversion rate, this may mean a large soft-launch marketing spend to pull in 50,000 players. Prior to the soft launch, the game should have well-planned IAP and pricing as well as core mechanics that drive players towards IAP and repeat conversion. His examples of good monetization included well-balanced bundles in Golf Clash, gacha and collection mechanics in Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, soft pinch points in Clash Royale and good integration in the core reward loop in Best Friends Forever.

DeltaDNA dispenses useful insights from their analytics which can be found on their blog at https://deltadna.com/.